Comment by znpy
1 day ago
Drama has killed the technological progress in open source, if you ask me.
Having seen what goes on in the foss world and what goes on in the large faang-size corporate world, no wonder the corporate world is light-years ahead.
It is a fundamental constraint of consensus based organizations. You need hierarchy to move faster but that has other disadvantages.
You don't need hierarchy, but you need some sort of process. "Consensus-based" just means that the loudest and most enduring shouters get their way, and when their way fails spectacularly, they leave in a huff (taking their work with them, badmouthing the project, and likely starting a fork that will pull more people out of the project and confuse potential users who just bail on trying either.)
Those people need to be pushed out early and often. That's what voting is for. You need a supermajority to force an end to discussion, and a majority to make a decision. If you hold up the discussion too long with too slim a minority, the majority can fork your faction out of the group. If the end of debate has been forced, and you can't work with the majority, you should leave yourself.
None of this letting the bullies get their way until everything is a disaster, then splitting up anyway stuff.
Hah. Naive take. I especially love this “Those people need to be pushed out early and often. That's what voting is for. You need a supermajority to force an end to discussion, and a majority to make a decision”. We know what needs to be done, but it’s not being done. There’s no consensus. Consensus take time and effort and has a lot of friction. I am part of a coop and I have seen first hand how this goes. And it’s fine, consensus based systems have other advantages, but they move slower that hierarchies.
I can recall a distinct time period where us ssb devs were passing around the url to "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" via local-first encrypted direct messages. The essay helped us understand what was happening but alas we did not have the tools to stop it happening to us!
Nah, it is not.
The core of the issue is that drama is a way to impose your views of the world.
In foss software you quite literally don’t have to agree. You can fork the software and walk your own path. You can even pull changes from the original codebase, most licenses allow that.
Consensus is only necessary if you care about imposing your views of the world onto others.